Joan Dye Gussow

Dr. Joan Dye Gussow is a serious food producer, a writer, Mary Swartz Rose Professor Emerita and former chair of the Nutrition Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Officially retired, she still co-teaches her popular course on nutritional ecology every fall. She has served on and chaired the boards of many organizations, but currently serves only on the boards of the Sustainability Fund and the Rockland Farm Alliance and on the advisory board of Kids Can Make a Difference. Until December of 2012, she was also on the Board of Trustees of Piermont, her Hudson River village. She has previously served two terms on the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences, and single terms on the FDA's Food Advisory Committee, and the National Organic Standards Board. She is author, coauthor or editor of a number of articles and several books; the latter include The Feeding Web, The Nutrition Debate, Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce and Agriculture and This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader, published in 2001 and based on the lessons learned from 30 years of working on growing her own. Her latest book Growing, Older was published by Chelsea Green in November of 2010, and though she harbors some doubts about there being a market for a third memoir from a woman in her ninth decade, she is at work on a new book.